Field
The present disclosure relates generally to information-centric networks (ICNs). More specifically, the present disclosure relates to an ICN architecture that can eliminate undetected Interest loops.
Related Art
The proliferation of the Internet and e-commerce continues to fuel revolutionary changes in the network industry. Today, a significant number of information exchanges, from online movie viewing to daily news delivery, retail sales, and instant messaging, are conducted online. An increasing number of Internet applications are also becoming mobile. However, the current Internet operates on a largely location-based addressing scheme. The two most ubiquitous protocols, the Internet Protocol (IP) and Ethernet protocol, are both based on end-host addresses. That is, a consumer of content can only receive the content by explicitly requesting the content from an address (e.g., IP address or Ethernet media access control (MAC) address) that is typically associated with a physical object or location. This restrictive addressing scheme is becoming progressively more inadequate for meeting the ever-changing network demands.
Recently, information-centric network (ICN) architectures have been proposed in the industry where content is directly named and addressed. Content-Centric Networking (CCN) and Named Data Networking (NDN) are the leading Interest-based ICN approaches. For example, in CCN, instead of viewing network traffic at the application level as end-to-end conversations over which content travels, content is requested or returned based on its unique name. The network is responsible for routing content from the provider to the consumer. Note that content includes data that can be transported in the communication system, including any form of data, such as text, images, video, and/or audio. A consumer and a provider can be a person at a computer or an automated process inside or outside the CCN. A piece of content can refer to the entire content or a respective portion of the content. For example, a newspaper article might be represented by multiple pieces of content embodied as data packets. A piece of content can also be associated with metadata describing or augmenting the piece of content with information, such as authentication data, creation date, content owner, etc.
One problem facing the current ICN architectures is that Interest loops may go undetected when Interests from different consumers requesting the same content are aggregated and Interests are forwarded along routing loops, which may occur due to failures or congestion. Current forwarding strategies may use nonces and the names of named data objects (NDOs) as the basis of Interest loop detection. However, such forwarding strategies often cannot work correctly in the presence of Interest aggregation. Certain improved forwarding strategies provide a remedy to the Interest loop detection problem by requesting Interests to state a hop count to an intended name prefix. However, such an approach requires changing the format of the Interest and requires that the routing protocol operating in the control plane of the network maintains hop counts to name prefixes in addition to any other type of distance information that may be used in the network (e.g., congestion- or delay-based distances). Such a solution is, therefore, undesirable. In addition, the hop count to name prefixes may not be enforceable across autonomous systems.